


the nameless black of a name

by Ias



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Everybody Lives, F/F, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:57:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The body which lies beneath the Haudh-en-Elleth does not have a name. Finduilas wanders the wilderness in its stead, and there meets someone as lost as she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the nameless black of a name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



The orcs drive them forth long into the night, far from the smoking remains of their home. Finduilas moves as if through a nightmare, made real only by pain. Her throat was sore from calling the name of one who would not save her. Her mind was sore from loving the same.

They stop in the dead of night, cruel voices rising around them as the party lumbers to a halt. Some of the prisoners collapse on the spot, the last strength of their limbs failing. Finduilas sinks to the ground, huddling against the strange languages and clank of iron from the edges of the clearing around them. They are hemmed in, penned like animals.

When the shadow appears before her, she scarcely has the energy to flinch. But in the faint starlight she recognizes that this figure is no orc. Her hair shines with a brightness like to Finduilas’s own, but it is the gleam of her eyes that shines brightest. They burn with the intensity of a candle moments before it swallows its wick.

“Give me your clothes, my lady,” the woman whispers fiercely. Finduilas stares at her without comprehension, seeing nothing more of her expression than a dark shape in the deeper darkness. The woman grabs a fistful of her robes. “Your finery betrays who you are. They will kill you first, if they know. We are of a like build and color—take my raiment, and escape their notice.”

“And what of you?” Finduilas says. “Would you doom yourself to whatever fate might have befallen me?”

The shadow seems to sag. “I would, my lady,” the woman whispers. “When the city fell… my family… I cannot go on for long. I would see some good done, before the end.”

And it is true, Finduilas realizes—there is a dullness in the woman’s voice that she almost mistook for exhaustion, but hears now the difference. It is the soft fall of dust on a still and lightless plain, already beginning to Fade. Finduilas feels something in her heart collapse. She cannot accept what the woman is offering. Yet already there is the rustle of cloth, the sound of clothing being shed in haste.

“Hurry, my lady,” she whispers. “They will not rest for long, and the light of dawn already betrays us.”

Finduilas looks upwards, to the stars already paling in the light of the coming sun. Below, the world is still steeped in what seems to be a permanent night. “I cannot let you do this—” Finduilas begins to say, but the woman has reached forward and is removing her clothing for her. Finduilas does not have the strength to resist. She dons her new clothes with numb hands as the light begins to wash out the sky: she looks up into the eyes of the stranger that has become herself, a shade, the world already wearing thin as her fëa continues to slip away. And Finduilas—she is someone else.

The orcs rouse moments later to the sounds of movement in the forest around them. When the Haladin attack it is swift and brutal, but the orcs are swifter and their brutality has been honed to a wicked edge. They come for the prisoners first.

Finduilas never expected to draw from the knowledge gained from the sparse bouts of combat training she’d taken up in Nargothrond. They had been something to ease her mind, to prove to herself that she could face the gathering darkness outside of her walls. In the first rush of dark iron cutting towards her, her body reacts while her mind is still frozen in terror. She ducks beneath the bow, which sends the orc swinging off balance—she hastens its fall with a shove to the back, and before it can struggle to its feet she seizes the dagger from its belt. The blow strikes between the plates of its armor, slipping between ribs—when its hand loosens on the sword, Finduilas takes it up with hands moving too quickly to shake. Around her the orcs close like a fist around their prisoners, but before her there is an opening.

“With me!” she cries to her fellow prisoners over the screams and clash of combat. Beyond the clearing with the prisoners, the orc host struggles with the Men weaving in and out of the trees. Finduilas runs for them with her stolen sword in hand, hearing the pounding of footsteps behind her and unsure whether they were friend or foe. She risks a glance behind her and locks eyes with the woman who bore her clothing. Other prisoners had followed, escaping the slaughter behind—as Finduilas turned to lead them on, she saw the point of a sword thrust at her face.

She parried the blow with a cry, yet was not fast enough—she turned it aside, where it skimmed over the top of her shoulder and scraped against the bone. Pain blistered through her, yet she grit her teeth and slammed her pommel between the yellow eyes of her attacker. She did not stop to see if he rose again.

A harsh voice rose in a language like the clash of iron, sounding over the din. It took Finduilas a moment to recognize the words: “Kill the princess! It’s her they’re after.”

Immediately, several pairs of Orcish eyes turned towards her. She froze, feeling the press of her fellow prisoners bunching up behind her. The woman in her clothes has a grip on Finduilas’s arm like steel. Finduilas locks eyes with one of the approaching orcs and raises her sword. But a blow hits her from the side, dull pain exploding on the side of her head as she’s thrown to the ground. For a moment she can only lay there, head ringing, and wait for the Orcs to follow their commander’s order. If she must die, at least let it allow the others to escape.  

But no hands seize her, and no sword pierces her body. It is only then that she remembers, struggling to sit up and see through the chaos. A flash of golden hair so like her own draws Finduilas’s eye. Surrounded by orcs with her back to a tree, there is no fear in the woman’s face—it seems only an odd sense of relief. Finduilas staggers to her feet, a cry rising in her throat—the woman’s eyes find her own. In an instant, it is like looking into a mirror and realizing that she herself is the reflection.

When the spear rams into the woman’s’ heart Finduilas screams as if the death were her own. In a way, it is.

All around her there is blood sinking into the mud, Elven faces growing still and blank in death. Finduilas could not save them. There are hands that grab at her, Mannish voices that buffet her from every angle, but she  tears away—she runs for the deeper forest, the trees and shadows closing in around her as the sound of the battle fade away behind. No one pursues. She is no one worth chasing, lost in the forest in a stranger’s clothes that have become her own.

She only realizes afterwards that she never knew the woman’s name who died in her place. _She_ was Finduilas now, wearing her clothes and name and death, and the woman she had saved was no one at all.

 

 

Survival is not so difficult. Elves are resilient, and Finduilas has never been weak. She has the Orcish blade, and a knowledge of which plants can be eaten. She does not return to seek out her people. The bloody faces of her fellow prisoners drive her away. Yet her life has been bought at a high price, and she will not fade away.

Finduilas returns to the site of the battle in spring. It is not difficult to find; the mad footsteps of her flight are treaded deep into her memory. She learns later, from the Men who lived in these lands, of the outcome of the slaughter and the mound of piled stones on the hilltop where Finduilas the Elf-Maid died. Finduilas listens to these tales and says nothing to contradict them—for in a way, they are true. She has lost herself. Perhaps she returns to search among the tumbled stones of the grave. But instead, she finds the woman.

 At first, the sight of her is enough to make Finduilas’s heart stand up in her chest. The golden hair, the flash of skin (in memory pale under starlight with the frantic rustle of traded clothes)—she thinks she sees a ghost. But the specter stirs, and a moan passes her lips, and as Finduilas steps closer she sees that no spirit would have such dirty feet, or leaves tangled in her hair. She lays a hand on the woman’s shoulder and finds it flesh, but cold.

Finduilas slides her cloak from her shoulders and wraps it around the woman’s shivering form. A stranger’s clothes, from one nameless wraith to another. There are dwellings of Man nearby, but Finduilas knows them not—she bears the woman’s unconscious form back to her own camp, wedged in the crevice in the rock where the storm’s nimble fingers could not reach. She builds the fire up hot and sets her hands to the healing of the Elves. She can feel that there is something broken inside this woman that goes deeper than muscles or bone: a piece of the past broken in to jagged fragments, with no way of healing back. And there is something in her face, a familiarity that makes Finduilas’s heart lurch whenever her gaze wanders to those features unaware. She tends to her physical ailments as best she can, and does her best not to stare.

The woman passes from fever into sleep, and only then does Finduilas rest. Saving this woman is not the same as undoing the death she traded to another: she tells herself this, again and again, watching the woman’s face that even in sleep is creased with the memory of a frown.

 

 

The woman sleeps for days, and when she wakes it is the shadow of dreams that stare out of her eyes. She does not speak. Hardly a sound passes her lips, not even a cry when a stray ember nuzzles at the flesh of her hand. Finduilas is beginning to wonder whether the woman is a dream herself, a figment rising from the barrow like mist, delivered to her for a reason she cannot say. But the woman is flesh enough, and must have come from somewhere. Finduilas wishes to go out in search of the Men who must call her kin, but she is afraid to leave their camp for long enough to seek them out. There is strength in the woman before her, but suffering and pain as well. Finduilas knows well enough that there comes a time when the greatest strength is meaningless. She stays. The woman’s face haunts her still, a memory without form.

She begins to wonder how she came to be on the mound that night in the storm, ragged and naked and close to death. What could have driven her there? Perhaps this woman ran from more than Finduilas knew. Fate wore heavily on her sleeping form, a dark cloak around the soul that threatened to smother its light. She was pursued, but by what Finduilas could not say. Something hungry. Finduilas would not deliver this woman to it so quickly.

As soon as the woman is strong enough that her life is out of danger, Finduilas sets out of the cave and towards the smoke she sees rising over distant hilltops. The journey takes her the greater part of a day, but when the first of the low-slung wooden buildings comes into sight she hesitates on the fringes. Men walk the muddy streets, their cloaks cast about them and their eyes wary with constant toil. She sees none of the woman’s likeness in the color of their hair or the shortness of their stature. Yet Finduilas stops a man heading towards the forest, her cloak pulled up to cover her Elven ears. Dirt and weariness have clouded her features, turning the light of her kind muted. The man looks at her in surprise as a stranger, but does not know how strange she is.

“I seek a woman,” she says, “Tall, of golden hair and fair of face, and with a strength in her eyes.” Finduilas hesitates before concluding: “She does not speak.”

The man looks at her strangely, but shakes his head. “There are no maids such as that in Brethil,” he said. “None that I have seen, or heard of.”

“Then where else might I look?” Finduilas says urgently, but the man only shrugs. Finduilas can see it in his eyes: anyone missing in such a place is rarely found, and best if they were not.

“I need to buy some clothes,” Finduilas says, and the man points her to a house where a woman might trade with strangers. She conducts her business quickly, slipping back into the woods with a bundle over her shoulder and a shadow in her heart. If the woman was not of Brethil, then where did she come from?

The light of a fire dances from the mouth of the cave where they have made their camp by the time that Finduilas returns. She walks out of the darkness, feeling much like a wolf coming to prowl around unprotected sleepers: but to her surprise, it is a pair of alert grey eyes that meet her own, sitting up beside the fire. The woman has watched Finduilas feed the fire from the stock of logs nearby: she had done the same all day, quickly learning to forget her fear of the flames and embrace her love of the warmth.

Finduilas enters the cave cautiously, removing her gear and setting the bundle of clothing on the ground beside her. The woman sits up with Finduilas’s cloak over her shoulders, unembarrassed by the nakedness beneath. For a moment Finduilas finds her eyes travelling down to the dips in the woman’s collarbones, the ridges of her ribs, the dark nipples on her small breasts. The woman watches her watching, and at once Finduilas is ashamed. She looks up into that face that makes something ache like water trapped in her lungs, and pushes the bundle beside her forward.

“Clothing,” she says simply. The solitude of the wilderness has eaten her words until she is left with nothing but their skeletons, picked clean. The woman stares at the bundle with a mixture of wariness and curiosity. She reaches for it, pulls out the tunic and breeches and cloak—Finduilas thought only of practicalities when obtaining it, a lesson hard-learned in the wild.

The woman pulls at them with a slow-dawning smile, running her hands over their fabric yet not putting them on. “Clothing,” she says, the word carefully pronounced yet spoken clearly.

The sound of her voice sends a jolt through Finduilas’s being. “So you do speak,” she says. The woman does not respond. “Do you have a name?” The question is an odd one—not what her name is, but whether she has one—but it is the first that comes to mind. Finduilas has asked something similar many times before, and she receives the same silence. The woman looks at her when she speaks, attentive, yet never makes a reply. Finduilas cannot be sure she speaks the same language. She knows so little of Men.

“My name is—” She chokes on the syllables. She can no longer hear it spoken—it no longer belongs to her. Perhaps they need no names to distinguish them, alone in the world as they are. Perhaps they can both be ghosts.

 

 

As the woman’s strength grows, the depth of the break inside her becomes clear. Finduilas has to help her don her clothing, for the woman looks upon it as something strange and wonderful yet without much use. Once she can leave the cave, she steps out into the sunlight as if experiencing the first dawn. She is fascinated by the leaves, standing near the bowed branches of a tree and letting her fingers trail over the spring buds as if counting them. Finduilas watches her, struggles to understand the tug in her heart when the light catches the woman’s face.

She feels that she knows her, somehow—that they shared a dream long ago, but woke cold and empty. She begins to wonder if she has seen her before—if perhaps Finduilas was the one who lost her. Dadwen appeared to her as a specter of the woman who had saved Finduilas’s life, cast over the grave that had become a symbol of Finduilas’s guilt. For what purpose they had been brought together, Finduilas does not know.

They move their camp not long after the woman can venture out of it. Finduilas has become wary of staying in any one place too long. There is no safety left in the world, and the weight of the barrow mound draws her like water into a low place in the earth. They set out to the South, heading from nothing to nothing. Finduilas tells herself that she is seeking out those her companion belongs to, but she finds herself avoiding the settlements of Men all the same.

For all her naiveté, the woman is not weak. Finduilas quickly learns to stop underestimating her when they are assailed on the road by an orc separated from its pack, and the woman bats aside its blows as if it were nothing but a playful kitten. She has no taste for battle, but she regards its stain as one who has seen much of it before. _There is strength in this one’s blood_ , she thinks, and the thought settles uncomfortably into her stomach, half of a realization trailing off into the same oblivion that holds this woman’s past.

When the silence weighs too heavily between them Finduilas speaks of the world around them. Grey clouds race through the sky as the air blusters their faces: “Wind,” she says, and the woman repeats it. They rediscover language together, this way—Finduilas as the frost might melt in some deep, cold place, and her companion in a sudden spark the births a flame. So spring turns to summer, and their words multiply like leaves on the branches in the heat.

 

 

“It is strange, not having a name.” The woman speaks thus one evening in their camp, staring into the flames with a look so different from that which she used to fix the dancing light with: she stares into it and beyond it, into herself.

“Surely you have a name,” Finduilas points out. “It was merely lost to you, like all the others.”

“And yet if it was lost, it is gone forever now.” She stoops forward to pluck up a stalk of the soft grass beneath them. “Does the blade of grass know its name?” she mused, turning it over in her fingers. “Or does the name exist only to those that do the naming?”

Finduilas shrugs. “Grass is grass,” she says. “It does not need to know such in order to be it.”

The woman casts the stalk into the flames. “A name is a place in the world,” she says. “It marks where things belong.” Her mouth twists bitterly. The implication is clear. Here they are, two nameless wanderers, belonging nowhere.

“Shall I name you?” Finduilas says suddenly. She is not sure why she says it, but the woman looks up so sharply that she cannot bite the words back.

Still, a smile spreads over her lips. “Named by a fellow nameless one,” she muses. “It does seem…” She pauses, a familiar frown creasing her brow.

“Ironic,” Finduilas supplies.

“Ironic!” The woman exclaims, as if reclaiming an old memory. The woman laughs, a clear sound that drags forth a smile onto Finduilas’s lips as well. “You certainly are skilled at naming things,” the woman continues, the hint of laughter still clinging to the corners of her eyes. “Yes, a name given by you would be no small favor. I would accept it, if you grant it.”

Finduilas meets her gaze, unable to look away. How to capture the woman before her in a single word? She is _bellas_ , _malthen_ , _maidh, bain_. In a world full of names, no one could suffice. Yet the answer comes to her, in the flash of lightning on a distant hilltop, a ghost spread out over the grave that should have been hers. Swallowing past the dryness in her throat, Finduilas speaks. “You are _Dadwen_ ,” she says. “It means, ‘return’.”

The word seems to settle over the woman slowly, as a straightening in her shoulders and a glow in her eyes. “Dadwen,” she repeats. “And what am I returning to?”

 _To me_. The words remain locked behind her teeth, but they shake Finduilas to the bone all the same. She forces a smile, looking away. “To the world,” she says. “To yourself.”

A long silence draws out between them, broken only by the crackling laughter of the fire. “And shall I name you?” The woman—Dadwen, now—speaks slowly, but without hesitation. Finduilas draws her cloak closer around herself against a chill that comes from the inside. She cannot accept the gift being offered to her.

Dadwen needs no explanations. They fall into silence once more, but the weight of the name hangs between them like the writhing heat of the flames.

 

 

 

Summer fades too quickly, and soon they go to their bed rolls with each breath misting in front of their faces, and awake to frost clinging to their eyelashes. They sleep side by side now, pressed closer together and lying as near to the fire as possible without waking up to burns. Finduilas knows that soon they must find more permanent shelter, yet something drives her away from the settlements of those that might offer them aid. It is not just the weight of solitude that drags her feet in sight of chimney smoke; she senses that the fate she saw wearing heavy on Dadwen tracks them even now, a long shadow snaking behind them into some deeper darkness. Here in the wilderness, there is only cold and hunger and weariness—but something worse awaits in the world at large, and Finduilas cannot help but try and protect them from it.

The autumn chill worries at their bodies like an old bone when they stumble across the cottage. It is clear from the beginning it has been long unlived in, abandoned with the first incursions of the orcs and ransacked by bandits until all that’s left are the walls and broken furniture. Finduilas wishes to keep moving, until Dadwen’s pleas hold her fast.

“I’ve never slept in a house before,” she says, her eyes shining bright with the same childlike joy of learning the names of the world.

“You almost certainly have,” Finduilas replies.

“Well if I have, I cannot recall it,” Dadwen says.

“Such a place is a beacon for those who might wish to find us. It is safer in the wilds.”

“Yet the nights grow a little colder with every pass of the sun,” Dadwen says. “For one night, my friend, can’t we sleep in the warm?”

In the end, Finduilas agrees. She is quickly discovering that she can deny Dadwen nothing.

They light a fire under the leaning chimney and cover the windows as best they can; as darkness falls outside, for the first time in a long time Finduilas feels warm and safe. It is a false sense of safety, but for one night with Dadwen she will let herself believe it. They set up their bed rolls near the fire, side by side as has become their way. It strikes Finduilas that there is no real need to share warmth, with the comfort of four walls around them—yet as Dadwen settles down and presses against Finduilas’s back with a strong arm around her waist, Finduilas only sighs in contentment.

How far they have gone, she muses, from where they have come. Dadwen out of an oblivion without memory or names, and Finduilas—it has scarcely been any time at all since she would sleep in a bed behind stone walls, eat meals prepared by another’s hands. Yet those things all belong to a different life. Not better, not worse, but not hers.

Despite the comfort that washes over her like heat from the fire, she lies awake for some time. At her back she feels Dadwen stir, her breath a soft touch on Finduilas’s neck. The sensation stirs something inside of her. In all the times they have lay together thus, the cold and hard ground prevented thoughts from wandering towards that which was warm and soft. Yet now, Finduilas cannot seem to ignore the press of Dadwen’s hard breasts to her back, nor the grip like iron of the woman around her waist.

“You do not sleep.” The voice in her ear makes her tense—she had thought Dadwen herself had drifted off long ago. Slowly, Finduilas shakes her head. Dadwen sighs again, her head coming forward to nuzzle against the back of Finduilas’s shoulder. The hand which Dadwen holds her with traces slow circles on Finduilas’s stomach.

“There are some words that you have not taught me,” she says softly. Her words make something prickle against Finduilas’s skin, like the point of a knife drawn over it from the inside. She shivers as Dadwen presses a kiss to the side of her neck. It freezes the breath beneath her touch.

“Words for this,” she whispers, as the hand travels to Finduilas’s hip, circling it gently, then up to touch her breasts. “Words for how this makes me feel.” The hand caresses her through the fabric of her tunic, then loosens the laces to slide inside. Finduilas’s breath comes out in a sharp gasp as Dadwen’s touch travels between her nipples, kneading the tender flesh until it peaks and then moving back to the other. She moves as if each inch of Finduilas’s skin is a new discovery, explored like Dadwen might turn over the syllables of a new name. It is only now that Finduilas realizes how badly she has wanted this, as she turns her head and captures Dadwen’s lips with her own.

They are soft, and warm, but they do not yield—Dadwen kisses her as someone who knows what they want, and will let nothing stand in the way of them getting it. Her hand retreats from Finduilas’s tunic, only to struggle with the laces of her breeches. Finduilas helps her, breathing hard at the kisses and bites Dadwen plasters to her neck. There are no words now—not as Dadwen’s hand slides over her and into her, not as the cries slip past Finduilas’s throat, not as she feels her body filled with heat and movement and pleasure so sharp it could have been agony. No words, as she feels Dadwen bringing herself apart behind her, the restrain hisses of her breath, the sharp, desperate way her body crumples.

As they lay in warmth and contentment afterwards, there is nothing more to say. For now, the silence is enough.

 

 

 

They remain at the cabin. It is a decision made by both of them and neither; they simply let the sun rise higher and higher the next day, curled around each other with the still-warm embers of the fire before them, and do not leave. The next day it is much the same, only now Finduilas goes hunting; they eat a meal sitting on the floor by the fire, and their kisses taste of the winter berries Dadwen gathered from the bushes nearby. Soon after, Finduilas sets traps; Dadwen begins repairing the roof. It’s as much of a declaration that they are staying here as either of them needs.

Autumn turns to winter as suddenly as the wind blows the storm, howling winds threatening to tear their sanctuary apart as the snow piles up outside. They are not afraid. They have food, water, each other. They have both been through worse.

The months wear on, and as winter closes over the land like a vicelike fist, it also serves to protect them. Finduilas sees no one as she ventures forth to hunt and check her traps; Dadwen gathers more firewood with only the ghosts of her breaths for company. They repair the furniture, starting with the bed: it takes much effort to convince Dadwen that anything else is needed. Outside of the cabin, the snow covers everything in stillness and silence. Inside, Dadwen and Finduilas break down that silence together.

The sound of a horse’s hooves breaking the skin of the snow is the only warning of the stranger’s arrival before the knock on the door.

“Hello?” A male voice calls from outside. “I saw the smoke from your chimney. I’m a traveler—I mean you no harm.”

Finduilas presses herself to the wall on the other side of the door, heart beating fast. Dadwen is gone, outside collecting snow to melt into water—if there was one rider here, could there be others out in the woods? The thought of them finding Dadwen hardens her resolve. She slips the old sword out from under the bed and grips its familiar hilt. It lends her the strength to speak.

“Who are you, and what have you come here for?”

Outside the door, she heard the sound of the man rubbing his hands together in the cold. “I wish only to warm myself by the fire before continuing my journey.” Something about his words carries something familiar, a tone or accent that twitches in the back of Finduilas’s mind.

“And where do you journey to?” Such suspicion once would have made Finduilas cringe. Now it is a cold necessity.

The man hesitates. “Not a place, so much, as a person. I seek Niniel, daughter of Morwen, sister of Turin, who was lost to me in the wake of the dragon.”

The sword clatters to the floor.

Finduilas grasps at the wall behind her, her breath drawing no air into her lungs; that name is one which she had last heard torn from her own lips, in terror and in sorrow as the man himself stood like a stone as she was driven away. She had loved him so keenly, and that love had turned to ash; a terrible realization creeps up on her by the moment. She needs air. She flings the door open to face it and finds herself face-to-face with the first of her kind she had seen since the mimicry of her own face pinned by a spear to a tree.

The Elf looks at her in surprise, perhaps more so at the distress on her face than the familiar Elven features. “You know of Turin?” she says, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “Does he live?”

“He does, my lady,” the Elf says, concern lighting his features. “But it is not him which I search for.”

“Who?” she cries, clinging to the frame of the door as if the storm-winds were sweeping down out of the North once more. “What is her name?”

And from the edge of the forest she sees Dadwen step forth with a bundle of wood in her arms, staring at the Elf before their door. He follows Finduilas’s gaze to the golden woman before them, and at once let out a cry. “Niënor! _Glass nín le!_ I have found you at last!”

 

 

 

Finduilas sits before the fire and listens to the tale their stranger tells, her eyes remaining ever on the fire. He introduces himself as Mablung; he had been searching for this maiden without hope, yet unable to abandon his cause. When he speaks of Niënor, he looks at Dadwen with mingled awe and disbelief. It is from that expression that Finduilas turned away, anger twisting in her gut. Dadwen had not so much as denied the name that Mablung so carelessly tossed over her. It was an ill-fated name to Finduilas’s ears; she hears dark footsteps sounding in its echo, something weighty advancing closer with every step. Yet Dadwen sits in silence like to when Finduilas first discovered her, and listens to everything Mablung says with attentive ears.

“I was beginning to think I would never find you,” Mablung says. He seems to long to reach out for her and clasp her hand, as if to be sure that she was real. When he turns to Finduilas she looks away again quickly.

“How was it that you found her?” he asks. “It seems the best fate that could have been hoped for, having you to keep her safe.”

“I only nursed her back to health. She needed no further guardian that I could see,” Finduilas snaps.

Dadwen shoots her a strange look before turning back to Mablung. “She found me on the Haudh-en-Elleth, in the midst of a terrible storm. I was much as you describe me, without knowledge or language, and sick to the point of death. Without her, I would have surely perished—or fallen to a worse fate.” The truth of those words rings in the small space between them.

Mablung turns back to Finduilas, a warm smile on his face. “Then I must thank you again, my lady,” he says, and Finduilas knows that he means it. “Without you, it seems my quest would have failed.”

“Yet even now, it stands half-fulfilled,” Dadwen says. “What of my mother? I can remember nothing of her, but… it would please me to meet her again.”

Mablung’s face turns grim. “No word has come of your mother, good or ill,” he says. “I cannot say where she would have wandered to. But she is strong and skilled just as you are, and my heart says she lives yet. Finding you here has only increased my hope.”

Finduilas sits rigidly in her chair, her hands white-knuckled in her lap. She wants to leap to her feet, to grab Dadwen by the shoulders and shake her—to demand how she can simply listen to this stranger and accept his every word. Could it not be coincidence that he sought for a maiden without memory? Were there not others of her description in this part of the world? But even without voicing them aloud, her protests all flat in her mind. Finduilas knows that Mablung speaks the truth even without verifying its certainty for herself. She can sense it in the shadow that hangs around his words, an echo of that which Dadwen bears. But Dadwen—Finduilas cannot accept her other name, not yet—pays no heed to the danger that draws closer around the,

“And of my brother?” Dadwen’s voice is quiet, but it carries through the silence with force. Finduilas feels a shiver run down her spine at the memories that rise to the surface.

Mablung shakes his head. “He survived the sack of Nargothrond, my lady, and was last seen going in pursuit of you. But Turin is stubborn of mind and all too often hard of heart; fate has wound itself deep into his fiber, and he will not be drawn from its course easily.”

Dadwen nods, deep in thought. In the silence Mablung leans forward, his eyes bright and moving between Dadwen and Finduilas in turn. “Now that you have been discovered, everything can be different,” he says earnestly. “You can return with me to Doriath—King Thingol will welcome both Elf and Man alike when he learns what has come to pass. You can forsake these rough lodgings, and live as you were meant to—in comfort, without fear of blade or cold or hunger.”

Finduilas does not tell him that blade and cold and hunger did not frighten her. They were old acquaintances now, appearing at unexpected times and yet accepted as a part of life. Without the hard edges of the life she’s carved for herself—and for Dadwen—Finduilas is not sure what she will be at all. What she was before, she cannot return to. That is all she knows for certain.

Finduilas rises and walks the few short paces to the other side of their shelter, her hands clasped behind her back. “Niënor make speak for herself,” she says, the name tasting flat and ashy in her mouth. “But for my answer: I would rather remain here.”

“But you cannot remain here,” Mablung cries, gesturing at their home in derision. He turns back to Dadwen for support. “I mean no disrespect, my lady, but this is no fit life for either of you! If you could only remember how things were in Doriath—”

“But I am not of Doriath,” Dadwen interrupts him, her voice as level as a steel blade. “You have told me much of my past, and my body remembers even if my mind does not. This life is not a hardship for me. It is where I came from.”

Mablung falls to his knees beside his chair, his expression beseeching. Finduilas watches the tableau from the corner, silent and wary as a wild animal, yet her heart races furiously in her chest. “Lady Niënor,” he says, taking one of her hands in his own, “please do not let my quest be fulfilled for nothing. If you were to perish here in the wilds when I could have prevented it, I would never be able to forgive myself.”

Finduilas half-expects Dadwen to yank her hand away. She is not gentle, no matter how Mablung calls her lady. Yet a soft smile breaks over her face, and she rests her other hand atop Mablung’s as if to calm a frightened animal. “I have not perished yet,” she says gently, “and I have no plans to do so. For me, your quest is already fulfilled: you have found me alive and cared for beyond your hopes. But my mother still needs you—and I suspect, my brother as well. It is they who demand your help, not I.”

Mablung lowers his head. Finduilas is almost fascinated by how quickly Dadwen has disarmed him. Finduilas realizes that there is much she has yet to learn of this woman, whose new memories have been built on hardship as much as wonder. “Will you at least consider returning with me?” Mablung asks. “I do not need an answer now. All I ask is that you think of what I offer until I return.”

Dadwen bows her head. Her hands slip away from his as her eyes find Finduilas’s. “I promise you that we will.”

 

 

Mablung remains with them for three days. When he leaves, he promises to return before the break of spring with word of Dadwen’s family. Finduilas speaks little while he is here—when he leaves, she falls into utter silence. It seems to her that the next words spoken will be Dadwen announcing her decision to return with the Elf when he comes. Instead, the air becomes so thin and cold that no words can survive in it. Dadwen’s gentle attempts to coax her into speech fall flat. Finduilas spends much of her time in the woods, her boots crunching through the snow, as she imagines what it would be like to return to a cabin without Dadwen waiting for her, and knowing Dadwen will never return.

She tries to picture Dadwen in fine robes and silks, but can only remember her as she found her that first night—naked, her skin as smooth as any silk. She cannot see Dadwen in a crown. As for Niënor, that woman is a stranger wearing Dadwen’s face like a mask. Finduilas cannot picture her at all.

One night Finduilas returns to the cabin late. Dark has fallen, and the cabin stands dark in the center of the moonlit clearing. Finduilas trudges up to it, the sense of warmth and recognition strangled out by her own cold thoughts. She opens the door and hangs her bow behind it, raising her hands to blow on them before realizing that the hearth is cold, and Dadwen is not there.

Her cloak and boots are gone, as is her dagger. Finduilas stares at the empty spaces where such familiar items should be and feels her stomach begin to curl into itself like burning paper. Would she leave, stealing away while Finduilas was gone to avoid the embarrassment of saying goodbye? Could she turn her back on everything they had built so easily? Staring at the empty cabin around her, the answer is clear enough. The building already seems to be a husk, the withered remains of a place filled with life no more. But what kind of life was it, really, for one who now could live as a princess?

And yet Finduilas cannot let her go—not without saying goodbye. There have shared so few words between them, yet this once she will demand just a few more.

She turns on her heel, yanking the door open with shaking hands and fighting her way into the snow. Under the moonlight, the tracks are filled with blue shadows. Finduilas finds the freshest ones that she knows are not her own, and follows them into the forest. She moves erratically, lunging forward through the thick layer of snow that clutches at her boots and nearly sends her sprawling. She will not check her pace. It seems Dadwen grows further from her by the moment, dissolving into the same oblivion that Finduilas pulled her out of. She appeared like a specter on the grave Finduilas should have called her own, and now she would disappear without a trace once more.

The tracks lead down a steep gully, picking back and forth over the icy slope. Finduilas plunges straight down, unwilling to flag her pace. She has scarcely taken two steps when her footing falters, and she tumbles down the steep embankment snapping the thin branches of the dead bushes along the way.

She lays still in the snow at the bottom, feelings its cold bite into the skin of her face, yet lacking the will to move. Was this how Dadwen had felt, stretched out on the barrow with nothing before her or behind? Perhaps Finduilas is meant to stay here. If there is nowhere left where she belongs, then by necessity she must fade away.

The sound of footsteps crunches out of the darkness. A moment later, a soft touch settles on her shoulder—she turns her head, and looks up into Dadwen’s face.

The woman looks down at her with concern, yet there is anger in the hard line of her mouth. “I went out looking for you,” she said. “You were out for so long—I thought…”

Finduilas laughs, a short, harsh sound. Moments later she presses a gloved hand to her face to hide the way her expression crumbles, burying her grief and fear behind the ice that melts against her skin. Dadwen’s embrace surrounds her, a barrier against the cold, and for a long moment Finduilas simply allows herself to be held. “I know that you must leave,” she whispers into the crook of Dadwen’s neck. “Your place is with your people, not alone in the wilds with me. And yet the name he has given you… it feels ill to me. There is darkness in more than its meaning alone. Fate pushes close around it.”

Dadwen pulls back, and in the moonlight Finduilas marks a bitter smile on her lips. “My people are scattered, defeated,” she says. “And besides, I remember them not. In Doriath I would find sanctuary, but not belonging. And as for the name…” Her hand reaches down to cup Finduilas’s cheek. “I have another that suits me better, now.”

Finduilas closes her eyes and leans into Dadwen’s touch, the rush of relief that surges through her even now mingled with sorrow. “And what of your family?” she asks. “Your mother… your brother?”

The thumb that stroked Finduilas’s cheek went still. “I cannot recall either of them,” she said quietly. “And yet I feel the weight of them in the name that Mablung would cast over me. It has settled in my heart as well. As long as they are lost, I fear I will be so as well.”

 “Such a thing comes easily to us, it seems,” Finduilas murmurs, raising her head to meet Dadwen’s eyes again. “Your name has found you once more, yet have you never wondered at mine?”

Dadwen inspects her cautiously. “I wondered often enough. But as my name seemed lost forever, I could not trade it for yours.”

Finduilas has gone too far to turn aside from the truth now. She takes a steadying breath. “My name was once Finduilas,” she whispers. “I gave it to a woman who wore it to her death. Under that name I lived in Nargothrond. I—I knew your brother.” She takes a sharp breath, looking away. “Knew him, and loved him, though in the end it was for naught but sorrow.”

There is a beat of silence. And then, to her surprise, Dadwen laughs. “It seems my brother and I have more in common than I may have thought,” she says, eyes gleaming.

Finduilas glares at Dadwen until the mirth fades from her eyes. “I know, it is no laughing matter,” Dadwen says quietly. “I fear you have been caught up in the net of fate woven from my family’s name. It binds us fast even now, dragging us towards some dark purpose. Mablung will return, and bear my fate along with him whether he intends it or not.”

“Then we must leave.” Finduilas speaks quietly, but in the silence after her words she can hear the life they’d made for themselves crumble. They always knew it could not last. Yet Finduilas had hoped that perhaps it might last a little longer than that.

“Yes,” Dadwen agrees at last. “My mother and brother are lost, and so shall we be: and it seems to me that perhaps it is no road at all that will guide us to each other, wandering far astray as we are. Perhaps together we can undo the dark web that binds us closer to our doom every day. I do not believe I have the strength to do so alone.”

“Perhaps none do,” Finduilas said, resting a hand on Dadwen’s shoulder. “But my strength is yours, however you might need it.”

Dadwen covered her hand and squeezed it gently. “Finduilas,” she says, testing the name on her tongue. It is the first time Finduilas has heard her speak it aloud. Hearing it in the air, it seems to be calling up a ghost in the fog of her breath. “Shall that be what I call you?” Dadwen asks softly.

After a long while Finduilas shakes her head. “I have no other name than that,” she says softly. “But it is mine only by habit alone.”

“Then let me name you,” Dadwen whispers, and at once Finduilas is back in another time—the firelight separating them, and Dadwen’s name spoken from her lips for the first time. She turned away from her naming then. Yet now it does not seem so impossible, this casting-off of her old self. Never gone, not truly—but buried somewhere quiet, where it could be remembered at need. She nods, bowing her head before Dadwen as the woman places her hands on either side of her face.

“ _Vanwa_ ,” Dadwen speaks at last, the frost of her breath spilling forth over them both. “You shall be ‘lost’, and I ‘return’; for as long as we are together there will always be hope—for escape, and finding our way home again.”

She tries the name out on herself: _Vanwa_. She feels the power in it, the way it binds her to Dadwen the way she bound Dadwen to her. They are tied together now. Perhaps they have always been. Vanwa clasps the other woman’s hand, her eyes shining bright in the moonlight. “Let us have hope, then” she says fervently. “For ourselves, and for your mother and brother as well.”

Dadwen squeezes her hand, and then leans in to press a kiss to Vanwa’s lips. Her mouth is warm where all else is cold, the only refuge that Vanwa will ever need. “Hope,” Dadwen agrees. The word hangs between them in their breath, and then slowly dissolves away.

They follow their footsteps in the snow, back to a home that will soon be behind them.

 


End file.
